A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.